Problem
Your reports may not represent reality.
What you would say
“Our GA4 and CRM numbers do not match and I do not know which to believe.”
- Urgency
- Usually urgent — it is costing money now
- First useful answer
- The real-action test usually finds at least one significant problem in the first two days.
- Investigation steps
- 7 steps, in a fixed order
Business impact
What this usually costs
- Budget moved between channels on the basis of wrong attribution
- Paid campaigns optimising towards conversion signals that are duplicated or fake
- Good pages cut and bad pages kept
- Agencies and teams judged on numbers nobody validated
- Board reporting that will not survive scrutiny
Our approach
What we would investigate
Inventory everything that collects data
Every GA4 property and stream, every GTM tag, trigger and variable, every ads pixel, and every CRM field that is supposed to capture source.
Classify every event and conversion
Correct, wrong, duplicated or legacy. Most containers we open have tags nobody currently owns.
Check what conversions actually measure
A conversion defined on a thank-you page view is not the same as a confirmed submission — and behaves completely differently when routing changes.
Perform real actions
Submit a real form, complete a real purchase or signup, click a phone link, and trace each one through GTM, GA4, the ads platforms and the CRM.
Test both consent paths
Granted and denied. A consent implementation that drops data instead of modelling it can move reported traffic overnight for a compliance reason nobody connected to the chart.
Check cross-domain and subdomain behaviour
One journey becoming two sessions inflates traffic, destroys attribution and creates enormous “direct”.
Reconcile against the CRM
Match front-end conversions against CRM records, quantify the gap, and explain each contributor to it rather than averaging over it.
Differential diagnosis
Likely causes, and what proves each one
| # | Possible cause | Evidence that confirms or eliminates it |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Duplicate or double-firing events | Real action traced through GTM preview and GA4 debug, event count comparison |
| 02 | Conversions defined on page views instead of confirmed actions | Conversion definition review against the real business action |
| 03 | Consent mode configured to drop rather than model data | Granted versus denied path testing, reported traffic against the banner go-live date |
| 04 | Cross-domain tracking not configured | Session fragmentation analysis, self-referral and direct traffic share |
| 05 | Lead source captured on the form but lost before the CRM record | Form payload versus CRM field completeness |
| 06 | UTM taxonomy applied inconsistently | Channel grouping accuracy audit, unassigned and (not set) share |
The no-guessing rule
If the data does not support a conclusion, we write “we do not have enough evidence to confirm this” and tell you what we would need. A guess never becomes a recommendation.Outcome
What you end up with
- A quantified, explained gap between GA4, ads platforms and the CRM
- A measurement plan built on the real business definitions of lead and customer
- Corrected event and conversion set, with dataLayer contracts for developers
- A GTM cleanup plan in a safe order
- Working consent, cross-domain and UTM configuration
- Documentation so the setup survives staff changes
No surprises
What happens if you get in touch
You send us your website and what is happening
One form, six fields. No call required to get started.
We review the situation
We look at your site and the public data before we reply, so the first conversation is useful.
We confirm whether we can help
If we are not the right fit, we say so — and where we can, we point you somewhere better.
We explain what we would investigate
Specifically: where we would look first and why, based on what we already saw.
You decide whether to move forward
No pressure and no follow-up sequence. You have the information; the decision is yours.
Questions
Questions about tracking problems
Evidence and further reading
- Worked example
GA4 and the CRM disagreed by 38%, and the marketing budget was moved on it
Four separate causes, each measurable. The team had been arguing about which number was right instead of decomposing the gap into its parts.
- Insight · Analytics
How to audit GA4 in a day (and why reading the interface is not auditing)
Almost every measurement problem we find is invisible in the GA4 interface and obvious in a traced real submission. Here is the order, and the four tests that find most of it.
Services that fix this, and problems that travel with it
- ServiceAnalytics & Revenue MeasurementMake the numbers trustworthy enough to make business decisions with — GA4, GTM, ads, consent and CRM.
- ServiceRevenue SEOConnect search to revenue, page by page, so you can see where organic performance creates or loses business value.
- ServiceGrowth DiagnosticFind the highest-value problems stopping growth, with the evidence behind each one.
- ProblemTraffic but no leadsUsually a traffic-quality problem, a conversion problem, or a measurement problem — and they need different fixes.
- ProblemA website migration is comingMigration losses are avoidable, but only with work that happens before launch — not after.